Every time a new champion releases it serves as a reminder that there are a large number of champions down on their luck, stuck watching new and improved versions of themselves hit the Fields of Justice or wishing their own skills hadn’t been nerfed into oblivion like some carnival-game rodent. Still other champions remain far stronger than they should be, or receive buffs that seem to make no sense. Today, I bring you champions from both those realms, champions I would gladly remove from the game until they can be reworked or simply remove altogether.
1. Galio – Yes, Galio. His ultimate stands as one of the best in the game for a couple reasons. First, and most obviously, the taunt. Taunt is a huge mechanic for any team, mostly because it’s like carry insurance. The best Galios I’ve seen know that if you can’t get to the enemy carry for some crazy reason, you use the ult to get your own carry out of trouble, giving him time to turn around and crush people you’re taunting. You also have to remember that the damage from Galio’s ult scales based on the damage dealt to him during the taunt, so if your fed carry gets caught with your squishy caster, the caster is likely to almost get one-shot. Galio’s ult is also problematic because of the implementation of suppression. Suppression pretty much nullified the use of cleanse for a lot of carries, and because so many other champions have speed boosts and dashes, a lot of carries run Ghost/Flash for survivability. If Galio catches those people they’re screwed.
Galio also has the benefit of being one of the best farmers in the game and one of the best anti-pushers in the game. He can burn through a wave of creeps very early in the game, forcing pushing teams into either a turret soaking teamfight or a stalemate while they wait on creeps. I wouldn’t be sad for a minute if this guy went missing.
2. Garen – I’m sure you expected this one, but it had to be said. Garen’s big problem is that he is insanely unfun to play against. While I understand the design behind his spin – high damage but only if you don’t avoid part of it – the reality is that the damage is very hard to avoid. He gets a speed boost from a skill that also silences you. If that skill lands, he starts to spin, often still boosted for a portion of it, and with a silenced target who now cannot Flash away or use any other skills to mitigate the damage. His ultimate is also extremely frustrating and regularly hits harder than any targeted spell in the game should, in my opinion. I’ve tried to watch closely over the past several days and seen several 800+ damage hits by level 11. That’s fine if he’s 10-0 and has crazy disgusting damage items, but he doesn’t. He has Sunfire Capes.
That’s the other problem with Garen. His build allows him to maximize damage output without sacrificing any other stats. Because most of his damage comes from spin, he benefits most from passive damage, like a Sunfire Cape. This also hybridizes his damage, making him difficult to build against defensively.
Lastly, Garen has Courage, which not only gives him scaling durability throughout the game, but also includes an active damage reduction, just in case he overextends by a hair and needs to make sure he lives. High durability, high damage, a silence, and the strongest finisher in the game? Sounds broken to me. Remove him.
3. Miss Fortune – You all knew Miss Fortune would make this list. Again, the problem with this champion is that she is insanely unfun to play against. Her Double Up hits way too hard for the lack of skill involved in casting, and she just has too many tools for laning. Her speed, long attack range, slow, and easily applied damage make her ridiculous in the lane, which gives her the farm she needs to be effective for the rest of the game.
4. Mordekaiser – I might be the only one who feels this way, but I
That ultimate. It has to be one of the most frustrating spells in the game. Throw in an ignite and it deals half of just about any champion’s HP at rank one. My big problem with it is that it gets stats from Kaiser, so suddenly there’s a toon with double the HP of anyone else around. Granted, it can’t cast or anything, but it makes a helluva tower tank, and it gives your team one more unit to deal damage with. If Kaiser somehow gains lizard buff and the ghost is ranged, well, have fun trying to run.
There’s worse news. That ult just got buffed.
The fifth and final spot was tough, if only because the rest of the frustrating mechanics I see in game are spread across a wide variety of toons. I was going to say Amumu, but I really think his ult just needs a nerf. He’s still a pretty fun guy to play and not terrible to play against if not for that ult. When I think about ease of use versus benefit to a team, the choice is obvious.
5. Sona – The Sona release is the worst thing that has happened to this game since old school TF. I mean that. I really do. It’s not just that she provides insane utility to your team (which she does) or that she has a disabling ult of the order typically reserved for tanks (which she does) or that she can literally keep any push alive just by her presence (which she can). It’s that she has all of these things and only one of them (her ult) requires any foresight whatsoever. The only thought the rest of her game requires is which skill is off cooldown and even that bit of mental heavy lifting can be circumvented by simply rolling your forehead across the keyboard. I’m personally a big fan of playing Sona with my feet.
In all honesty, I think the game would lose very little if these champions were no longer on the board. In most cases, I think we’d get a lot back. There would be less frustration with minimal fun loss.
